Currently, the short message service has become one of the most commonly used services of cell phone subscribers. In addition to a large number of point-to-point short message services, short message services from information platforms on the Internet to cell phone subscribers are developing rapidly. A short message gateway may provide a safe and fast channel for data exchange between a service provider (Service Provider, SP) and a short message center, and implement functions such as SP convergence, routing management, accounting and authentication, and storage and forwarding, so the establishment thereof is quite necessary. Along with the rapid development of services, requirements on the short message gateway become higher and higher, which are mainly embodied as: (1) processing short messages in high capacity/high rate; (2) having high reliability; (3) having low total costs of ownership (TCO); and (4) being capable of expanding dynamically.
As shown in FIG. 1, a conventional static cluster short message gateway is shown, which may be understood as the superposition of single sets of short message gateway, for fixedly allocating different service flows to a certain set of device in the cluster through a load balancer. The static cluster gateway is a whole for the short message center and an Enterprise Customer/Service Integrator (Enterprise Customer/Service Integrator, EC/SI), instead of a gateway 1, a gateway 2 and the like shown in FIG. 1.
In the foregoing technique, a waiting status report entity (that is, an original message for being matched with a status report, where if the matching is successful, it indicates that a short message is sent successfully) of the EC/SI can only be saved in a memory or database of the device, for being matched after a status report entity (that is, a report message for indicating whether a terminal has received the message successfully) is returned from a lower-level network element, and therefore, the service flow of a single EC/SI can only be allocated on a certain gateway device. If some gateway is down, a related service using the gateway is interrupted, and when the corresponding status report is returned from the lower-level network element, the status matching cannot be performed, thereby having low reliability.